awkward hand. The dirtiest, crummiest, cruddiest yellow under the sun and that awkward school-kid lettering in red. NEVER GIVE A INCH! Just like one of them mottos you might see in a Marine sergeant’s orderly office, or like something Coach Lewellyn might of drawn up to hang alongside his other hardnose signs all over the locker room. NEVER GIVE A INCH! Just like the corny, gung-ho, guts-ball posters that I seen a good thousand of, just exactly like, except for that raised picture of Jesus and his lamb under the gobby machine paint and them curlicue words you could read with your fingers at night when the lights went out, “Blessed are the meek” and so forth and so on. . . . It hung there and I never had no more idea than a duck what all was behind it till I was sixteen and she told me what she knew about it and I connected what Boney told me with what the old man told me, then hooked all this up with the women. Funny, how things sometimes take so long to click together, and how something like that sign can hang unnoticed right next to your head for so many years; yet you have to be beat across the knob with it before it starts to dawn just how much it was noticed, whether you knew it or not . . .)
When the boy Hank was ten, his mother, always grim and gray and distant—an almost identical remake of the nondescript grandmother he never knew—took to her bed in one of the dark rooms of the old house and devoted two months to some fervent ailing, then got up one morning, did a washing, and died. She looked so natural and unchanged in her coffin that the boy found himself striving to re-create conversations he had had with her—sentences she might have used, expressions—in an attempt to convince himself that she had once been more than that carved, peaceful form nestled there in ruffles of satin.
Henry didn’t expend half as much thought. The dead’s dead, was the way he looked at it; get ’em in the ground and look to the live ones. So, as soon as he had paid Lilienthal, the mortician, he picked a carnation from one of the wreaths, stabbed it into the lapel of his funeral suit, and caught a train to New York and was gone for three months. Three precious months, right out of the middle of cutting season. Henry’s youngest brother, Aaron, and his family, stayed at the house to take care of the boy. Aaron’s wife began to fret for her brother-in-law after the first weeks of his mysterious absence lengthened into months.
“Two months now. That poor man, grieving so. He’s more heartbroke than any of us would have ever believed.”
“Heartbroke the dickens,” Aaron said. “He’s back East somewhere looking for some girl to take the old lady’s place.”
“Now how in the world do you know that? Who does Henry know back East?”
“Nobody that I ever heard tell of. But that’s how Henry thinks: women come from back East, that’s how it is. You need a woman, go back East and get you one.”
“Why, that is out landish! That poor man is fifty-some years old. What reasonable woman would—”
“Reasonable woman the dickens. Henry’s back yonder looking for some woman he considers fit to be little Hank’s mother. And when he finds her, her being reasonable won’t have beans to do with whether she comes or not.” Aaron lit his pipe and smiled pleasantly, accustomed after many years to sit back and enjoy watching the world follow along whenever Henry took it by the nose. “An’ would you care to make a little bet about whether that poor old man comes back with her or not?”
Henry was fifty-one at the time, and to those who saw him pacing the New York streets, with a boyish grin beneath a black derby and wrinkles at the side of his face looking like fresh cracks in old wood, he looked possibly twice his age, as easily half. To the casual observer he was more archetype than human: the country rube come to the city, the illiterate hick with a young man’s wiry and vigorous stride and an old man’s
When the boy Hank was ten, his mother, always grim and gray and distant—an almost identical remake of the nondescript grandmother he never knew—took to her bed in one of the dark rooms of the old house and devoted two months to some fervent ailing, then got up one morning, did a washing, and died. She looked so natural and unchanged in her coffin that the boy found himself striving to re-create conversations he had had with her—sentences she might have used, expressions—in an attempt to convince himself that she had once been more than that carved, peaceful form nestled there in ruffles of satin.
Henry didn’t expend half as much thought. The dead’s dead, was the way he looked at it; get ’em in the ground and look to the live ones. So, as soon as he had paid Lilienthal, the mortician, he picked a carnation from one of the wreaths, stabbed it into the lapel of his funeral suit, and caught a train to New York and was gone for three months. Three precious months, right out of the middle of cutting season. Henry’s youngest brother, Aaron, and his family, stayed at the house to take care of the boy. Aaron’s wife began to fret for her brother-in-law after the first weeks of his mysterious absence lengthened into months.
“Two months now. That poor man, grieving so. He’s more heartbroke than any of us would have ever believed.”
“Heartbroke the dickens,” Aaron said. “He’s back East somewhere looking for some girl to take the old lady’s place.”
“Now how in the world do you know that? Who does Henry know back East?”
“Nobody that I ever heard tell of. But that’s how Henry thinks: women come from back East, that’s how it is. You need a woman, go back East and get you one.”
“Why, that is out landish! That poor man is fifty-some years old. What reasonable woman would—”
“Reasonable woman the dickens. Henry’s back yonder looking for some woman he considers fit to be little Hank’s mother. And when he finds her, her being reasonable won’t have beans to do with whether she comes or not.” Aaron lit his pipe and smiled pleasantly, accustomed after many years to sit back and enjoy watching the world follow along whenever Henry took it by the nose. “An’ would you care to make a little bet about whether that poor old man comes back with her or not?”
Henry was fifty-one at the time, and to those who saw him pacing the New York streets, with a boyish grin beneath a black derby and wrinkles at the side of his face looking like fresh cracks in old wood, he looked possibly twice his age, as easily half. To the casual observer he was more archetype than human: the country rube come to the city, the illiterate hick with a young man’s wiry and vigorous stride and an old man’s
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